The Arrow Lakes Route
Columbia was the fourth large sternwheeler to run on the 130-mile (210 km) long Arrow Lakes (and adjacent stretches of the Columbia River). Before the construction of the Keenleyside Dam in the 1960s, there were two Arrow Lakes, called the upper and lower, which were separated by a stretch of shallow water known as the Narrows. The lakes are part of the Columbia River, which flows into the upper Arrow Lake at Arrowhead, British Columbia, and begins again at the southern end of the lower lake near the towns of Robson and Castlegar. Steamers running on Arrow Lakes typically started from the railheads. In the early 1890s the northern railhead was Revelstoke about 25 miles (40 km) up the Columbia River from Arrowhead, where the transcontinental line of the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the Columbia. In the south, the Great Northern Railway had reached Little Dalles, Washington by the 1890s. Rail construction was ongoing however. C.P.R. was building an extension south from Revelstoke along the east side of the Columbia River, which would eventually reach Arrowhead. By 1894 the extension had only gone as far as the town of Wigwam, about half way between Revelstoke and Arrowhead, which became the northernmost point on the route for Columbia.
Read more about this topic: Columbia (Arrow Lakes Sternwheeler)
Famous quotes containing the words arrow, lakes and/or route:
“Anton Petrovich turned into the passage, followed the arrow to men, mankind, human beings, marched past the toilet, past the kitchen, gave a start when a cat darted under his feet, quickened his step, reached the end of the passage, pushed open a door, and a shower of sunlight splashed his face.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of space—out of time.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)